GAO Reports & Testimonies

active ●Ingestion health: delivering Legislative · Tier 1 · RSS feed · Government Accountability Office

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What this source is

The Government Accountability Office is Congress's audit and oversight arm. This RSS feed carries its reports and testimonies — program audits, evaluations, and legal decisions — with long report-summary descriptions (25 recent items, ~4,000 characters each; report pages extract at ~9,000 characters).

Identity and registry record

Registry id

gao-reports

Agency / parent organization

Government Accountability Office

Branch

legislative

Type

RSS feed

Status

active

Tier

1

URL (feed)

https://www.gao.gov/rss/reports.xml (opens in a new tab)

URL (home)

https://www.gao.gov/reports-testimonies (opens in a new tab)

Registered

2026-07-26

Registry notes

Probed 2026-07-26: RSS verified end-to-end — 25 items, avg description 4083 chars, sample article extracted (8987 chars text). robots.txt sets Crawl-delay: 420 in its User-agent: * block — the server's stated limit for all crawlers, honored without exception; that prices each article fetch at 7 minutes of wall clock. Posture decision 2026-07-28: feed-only (adapter rss-feed-only) — the ~4,000-char descriptions are GAO's own report summaries and carry the digest-relevant substance; the article page (~9,000 chars) adds mostly site furniture. Fewer requests, not faster ones. 16 bootstrap items ingested as full before the switch; later items are feed-only — both modes disclosed per item. Revisit if a report's summary proves insufficient (targeted single fetches remain possible within the delay).

How we ingest it

Channel

RSS feed

Method

RSS poll via AgencyClient, feed metadata only (crawl-delay economics; see notes).

Adapter

rss-feed-only

Poll cadence

about every 60 minutes while the collector runs

Request budget

the agency class: at most 3,000 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)

Politeness

robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded

Capture and hash

captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)

Ingestion health

●Ingestion health: delivering 43 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-09-28; 0 of 351 request(s) to www.gao.gov returned no content.

This label has held since 2026-08-03T18:46:01Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-09-29T10:51:00Z (UTC).

Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.

Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

Last 24 hours

Last 14 days

All time

Last 30 days, day by day

Each day runs midnight to midnight on Eastern time (Washington, D.C.), the publication day the digests use; the stored request stamps remain UTC.

Our ingestion assessment